In a wireless communication system, mobile stations, which may be referred to as MS, can be in one of the following states: State I: Receive or send traffic while in one or more active call sessions; State II: Do not receive or send traffic in any of the active call sessions; and State III: Not engaged in any active call session.
When an MS is either in state II or III, it can temporarily shut down all transmit and receive activities with the network. Therefore, these situations can be used as battery conserving and wireless resource saving opportunities. Although not limited in this respect, wireless networks based on Institute for Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) standard 802.16e may use sleep mode and idle mode operation to take advantage of State II and State III, respectively. Thus, an MS in these networks operates in sleep mode when it does not receive or send traffic while active in one or more call sessions. Similarly, it operates in idle mode while not engaged in any active call session
Thus, a strong need exists for techniques to efficiently transmit control messages to idle and sleep mode users in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) based wireless networks.
It will be appreciated that for simplicity and clarity of illustration, elements illustrated in the figures have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements are exaggerated relative to other elements for clarity. Further, where considered appropriate, reference numerals have been repeated among the figures to indicate corresponding or analogous elements.